Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality

by Helen Joyce

Consider the consequences for the feminist movement of accepting the activist mantra that ‘transwomen are women’ – or the logically equivalent proposition that ‘a woman is anyone who says they’re one’. I have seen these restated in many ways, sometimes quite poetically. To give just a couple of examples: women are ‘an imagined community that honours the female, enacts the feminine and exceeds the limitations of a sexist society’ (American transwoman Susan Stryker, writing in Time magazine); and women are ‘multifaceted, intergenerational, international . . . limitless, formless . . . women are the world’ (UN Women, quoting another transwoman, American-Antiguan model Aaron Philip). At drive-by speed, this sort of stuff may seem flattering, even liberating. After all, who wants to be nothing more than a sex object or walking uterus? But defining women as the people whose bodies developed along the female reproductive pathway is limiting only if you regard female embodiment as limiting. These redefinitions are the antithesis of the ‘radical notion that women are people’. They define womanhood as stereotypes enacted by people of different body types; rather than a body type that need not in any way limit the behaviour of the people who possess it.